The media October 2016

After the fact

On the death of objectivity in political journalism.

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What journalism is about is to attack everybody,” said the late Warren Hinckle, the sometime editor of Ramparts, according to his obituary in The New York Times this past August. (See Peter Collier’s feature earlier in this issue.) “First you decide what’s wrong, then you go out to find the facts to support that view, and then you generate enough controversy to attract attention.” Though the article, by William Grimes, seems to associate this attitude with what it calls “the no-holds-barred reporting style known as gonzo journalism,” it could also describe the approach to the news implicitly advocated on the paper’s front page a couple of weeks earlier by Jim Rutenberg:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald...

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